By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

February 10, 2012

For little more than a year, Mitch Epstein has been photographing trees around New York City, often setting out before dawn with an assistant and a 1985 parks-department list of arboreal landmarks. The idea grew out of an earlier series about energy production and consumption in America, in which trees served as foils for oil refineries and coal plants.

That was the America that Epstein found. The tree series shows the world, specifically the city where Epstein and his family live, as he prefers to see it. It also proves that you don’t have to travel far to go on a journey or to be awed by nature.

Coolly romantic and in black and white like Muybridge or Atget photographs, the pictures invert how most of us see the city. Without the focus on buildings and people, New York emerges as a wild place in plain sight, populated by eccentric creatures: Hangman’s Elm in Washington Square Park; a Caucasian wingnut in Brooklyn; an eastern cottonwood on Staten Island; an American elm in Central Park, growing from the rocks along Literary Walk like some giant hand reaching skyward out of the earth.

Epstein’s pictures are portraits of these trees, but only sort of. The trees are not archetypes. They’re neighborhood characters, metaphors for urban life and architectural monuments. Before a strip of Korean stores in Flushing, a stubbly bald cypress on Northern Boulevard stands on a windswept sidewalk — as with many of the trees Epstein picks out, it’s an immigrant in New York. In La Plaza Cultural garden in the East Village, a weeping willow, like some shambling teenager, hunches toward a clutch of young people as if trying to join their conversation. And on St. Nicholas Avenue at 163rd Street in Manhattan, an ancient English elm, “a totem in the neighborhood,” as Epstein puts it, with its aged limbs supported by steel cables, plays the cranky old man before an audience of dull gray buildings.

Then there’s the picture of a tulip tree in Queens. Said to be hundreds of years old, the tree is partly obscured by smaller, young tulips, but it has become a pilgrimage site for nature lovers who meditate on an abandoned milk crate next to the tree’s slim, craning trunk. Supplicants tune out the din from Douglaston Plaza and sometimes jot down thoughts in a notebook stuffed inside a plastic bag tied to a chain-link fence nearby. It’s Walden Pond beside the Long Island Expressway.

Unspoiled by digital effects, the photographs luxuriate in pregnant details. It is possible to make out each of the superfine branches of a silver linden in Prospect Park, caught like porcupine quills in the gap between seasons, and to take in all of the tattooed majesty of a massive weeping beech in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Into the beech — a wild behemoth, with weird orifices, not an inch of bark unspoiled — some vandal, we can see, has aptly carved Epstein’s implicit message across an upper branch. “HEAVEN,” it says.